In general, overclocking involves running a computer processor at a higher clock rate than it was designed to handle in order to increase its performance. Overclocking typically causes a respective processor to consume very high current compared to consumption when the processor operates within a range of lower acceptable frequencies as specified by a vendor.
High current consumption caused by overclocking may require that a respective power supply powering the processor include a sufficiently high number of power converter phases to deliver power to the processor. Otherwise, the computer processor will not be able to operate at such high frequencies.
To provide extra power, a power supply can be modified to include many power converter phases. However, although possible, it is often impractical and difficult to build power supply controllers with many extra phases due to chip package pin limitations, die complexity, die cost limitations, etc.
Where practical, conventional power supplies including many power converter phases typically implement so-called phase multiplying techniques to expand a number of phases in a power supply. Via so-called phase multiplying, one PWM signal can be divided to produce n (where n is an integer value) PWM signals. The PWM signals can then be used to control multiple phases.
As shown in FIG. 1, one conventional implementation of phase multiplying requires a combination of a single phase doubling driver 110 to be used in series with two additional dual phase driver circuits 120-1 and 120-2 to achieve phase quadrupling.
For example, in such a conventional application as in FIG. 1, the phase doubling driver 110 produces a first phase signal (zero degree signal) and second phase signal (180 degree phase signal) based on a received pulse width modulation signal, PWM1. The phase doubling driver 110 outputs the first phase signal 115-1 to a first dual phase driver circuit 120-1 in the series. The phase doubling driver 110 outputs the second phase signal 115-2 to a second dual phase driver circuit 120-2.
Each of the first dual phase driver circuit 120-1 and second dual phase driver circuit 120-2 can further divide the respective received phase signal from the phase doubling driver into two signals to control a respective pair of phases in the power supply. More specifically, the first dual diver circuit 120-1 splits the first phase signal 115-1 and drives the 0-degree phase (e.g., Phase #1) and 90-degree phase (e.g., Phase #2) of the power supply. The second dual diver circuit 120-2 splits the second phase signal 115-2 and drives the 180-degree phase (e.g., Phase #3) and 270-degree phase (e.g., Phase #4) of the power supply. Thus, according to one conventional application, a single pulse width modulation signal PWM1 inputted to the phase doubling driver 110 can be used to control four power converter phases in a power supply.